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Unsafe abortion is a significant but preventable cause of maternal mortality. Although induced abortion has been legal in Zambia since 1972, many women still face logistical, financial, social, and legal obstacles to access safe abortion services, and undergo unsafe abortion instead.

Unsafe abortion is a significant, but preventable cause of maternal mortality in Zambia. The authors compared the trajectories of women seeking safe abortion with those receiving care following unsafe abortion. They interviewed women accessing care in a large government hospital about their experiences.

Oxytocin is a natural hormone with uterine stimulant properties that plays a prominent role in obstetric practice. Clinical guidelines for oxytocin use intrapartum emphasise that injudicious use has serious potential for adverse outcomes for mother and baby. Oxytocin is readily available in South Asia and widely used in ways that flout these guidelines.

With its distilled lessons, this publication provides a situation analysis of why policies and interventions to address social determinants of health and health inequities succeed or fail. It also discusses important features of governance and delivery systems that increase likely success in reducing inequities.

Paying for performance (P4P) provides financial incentives for providers to increase the use and quality of care. P4P can affect health care by providing incentives for providers to put more effort into specific activities, and by increasing the amount of resources available to finance the delivery of services.

Cardiovascular disease (CVD), once thought to be confined primarily to industrialized nations, has emerged as a major health threat in developing countries. the turned to the IOM for advice on how to catalyze change.

This paper is part of a collection forming A Special Issue, which covers selected themes from a larger project on child mobility in Ghana, Malawi and South Africa. The themes are those which individual members of the Ghana research team identified as of particular interest and on which they have reflected, drawing on material collected and analysed by the team as a whole.

Community health workers (CHWs) are used increasingly in the world to address shortages of health workers and the lack of a pervasive national health system. However, while their role is often described at a policy level, it is not clear how these ideals are instantiated in practice, how best to support this work, or how the work is interpreted by local actors.

This paper seeks to characterise the social environments in which community-led health programmes are most likely to facilitate effective and sustainable health improvements, using three dimensions to characterise social contexts: material, symbolic and relational.

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